Minneapolis / I-35W bridge: Elegantly simple, or too simple?

Observers have debate, but motorists will see a difference

The collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge brought Minneapolis the kind of attention no city would want. Its replacement is unlikely to bring the kind of accolades most cities crave.

When it opens this week, the new bridge over the Mississippi River will restore a critical link in the Twin Cities traffic network. What the concrete box girder structure won't do is wow many fans of modern design, to the disappointment of some who hoped it would rise as an architectural jewel from the wreckage of its predecessor.

"We had an opportunity to build a signature bridge, and we didn't take it," said Jerry Foss, a real estate agent who lives nearby. "They chose an average bridge, and we got an average bridge."

In designing and building the new bridge, officials opted for practicality over pretension. "The first goal was to have a bridge that was safe and effective," Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said. But those who criticize the utilitarian nature of the span are missing something important, he said.

"I think the bridge does an excellent job of visually tying together a riverfront filled with great points of interest that need unity," Rybak said. He asked that critics withhold judgment until extensive landscape architecture around the bridge is finished sometime next summer.

Just a stone's throw from the new bridge sits the bracingly modern Guthrie Theater and a lushly landscaped city park, several distinctive car and pedestrian bridges, a collection of historic flour mills and clusters of luxury condos.

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"It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. This new bridge could have been something wildly dramatic, but it also might have distracted from some of the historic and interesting features in the area," said Ann Calvert, a Minneapolis official who sat on a visual design advisory panel for the new bridge.

Or as Linda Figg, the president of the firm that designed the bridge, put it: "Elegant simplicity."

Ben Heywood, who runs an art gallery near the north end of the bridge, said that description sounded to him like "a pretty good example of making virtue out of necessity." Still, Heywood said he was actually more pleased than he'd expected.

"I think part of the experience of bridges is they should be exciting to drive on, and this looks like it might be exciting to drive on," he said. The new bridge reaches its highest elevation right in the middle, improving what, on the old bridge, had already been one of the best views in town of the Minneapolis skyline.

Figg said designers tried to incorporate suggestions from regular bridge users who said it should be easier to see the Mississippi River while driving over the new bridge.

"On the old one, you didn't even know you were on a bridge, much less crossing the country's greatest river," said Melissa Bean, who lives just north of the bridge. "If they've remedied that, it's a good thing."

The new bridge features wider spacing between the guardrails in the sections over the river, intended to give better river views. One design element carries the water theme even further: On both ends of the bridge, the spots where the span passes from land to water will be marked with two sets of three vertical concrete "waves" reaching more than 30 feet into the sky.

"It's to let the driver know in a sculptural way that they are crossing the river," Figg said. At night, the waves will be illuminated by blue LEDs.

Peter Kitchak is a Minneapolis real estate consultant who, in the weeks after the bridge collapse, tried to get the renowned Spanish architect and bridge designer Santiago Calatrava involved in designing the replacement.

Had Calatrava had a hand in the new bridge, it would have joined other recent, "starchitect"-designed additions to the Minneapolis landscape like Jean Nouvel's Guthrie and Frank Gehry's Weisman Art Museum.

But even Kitchak pronounced himself happier than expected with the final product. "If I'm honest with myself, I don't know if Calatrava would have ended up with something much different," he said.

Heywood, the local art gallery director, said that given what happened to the old bridge it could have ended up looking tacky to replace it with a soaring attention grabber.

"Do we really deserve a showpiece of a bridge?" Heywood asked. "You wonder if we should just say, we don't deserve something too nice. We should just build a bridge and be thankful that not more people died."